Motorola DROID RAZR HD Full Review

Article Index

Software and User Experience

The RAZR M ships with Android 4.0.4, and there's only a minor skin present on the OS. In other words, Motorola has tweaked the vanilla Android experience that you'd get on phones like the Galaxy Nexus, but they don't go nearly as far as their previous approach, MOTOBLUR used to. When you boot the phone up, there's a typical clock / weather / charger widget up top, but the rest is fully customizable.

The RAZR HD features the option of creating up to six additional home screen pages and swiping to the left in the shade brings up the Quick Settings feature. Motorola's Circles Widget icons shows you the time, weather and current battery life at the top of the home screen. Swiping down on these coin-like widgets flips them over offering additional info for weather and even texts notifications. The keyboard is stock Android 4.0.4 with a microphone button at the ready up front, which we prefer as a method of texting. Incidentally, voice to text works pretty well, though perhaps not quite as reliable as we've experienced on the Galaxy S III.

Motorola also offers a quick voice command menu for functions like calling, search, texting, email etc. We really liked that feature and found it useful for quick voice controlled operation of common functions you'd used every day on the phone. If you're a big Siri or "Hello Galaxy" fan, you might find this basic functionality limited, but it gets the job done for most things you do on a smartphone these days. Finally, the rules menu allows you to setup action settings for the device which will put the phone in various states depending on what you're doing. Drive Smart, puts the phone in vehicle mode. Battery Saver turns off certain features of the phone and dims the screen, when the battery is low. Sleep Rule sets the phone to silent mode, but allows certain calls to come through if you want specific people to be able to reach you. You can also create your own custom rules with different combinations of situation scenarios triggering different actions on the device.